The Ten Best and The Ten Worst Legislators
Nineteen people you voted for and one you didn’t.
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Lanell Cofer, 31, Democrat, Dallas. A Hall of Fame Worst. Enjoys a nearly universal reputation as hostile, vindictive, and just plain dumb—the representative other legislators least like to deal with.
Grabbed the spotlight early in the session with a proposal to ship Texas Rangers and state funds to Georgia to help solve the Atlanta child murders. Stalked out of the governor’s office in a huff when he informed her that he couldn’t legally send Texas lawmen into another state uninvited.
Got her chance for revenge during committee hearings on the nefarious wiretapping bill, the foundation of Clements’s war-on-drugs program, and flubbed it. Cofer, an avowed foe of wiretapping, begged and pleaded to head the special subcommittee studying the bill until Billy Clayton finally gave in—but not before extracting a promise that she wouldn’t use her position to kill the bill. So she tried to use her position to kill the bill. Filibustered her own committee by offering 31 separate amendments, then withdrawing each one whether or not the committee was inclined to accept it—prompting an ally to walk out in disgust. Next, tried to hold a vote at an unannounced meeting, in violation of House rules. That didn’t work either. In the end, the committee approved the bill, and because of Cofer’s monkeyshines an opportunity for opponents to clean it up had been lost forever. A staffer working on the bill confessed, “We might have been in trouble with someone who knew what they were doing.”
Just awful in floor debate. Other members shudder when she approaches the microphone, especially if she’s on their side. Muddled debates on raising the welfare ceiling and requiring parental consent for teenagers’ abortions with pointless, uncomprehending questions. When one legislator attacked as “legalized burglary” the wiretapping bill’s provision allowing covert entry, Cofer took him literally and launched into a triage on the contents of police property rooms.
A time bomb in the midst of an already delicate Dallas redistricting situation. Flaked on both Republicans and Democrats so often that one side took to delegating a member to “baby-sit” her during critical stages in the bill’s formation. But when the explosion finally came, it was Cofer who got hurt. In the last move of a marathon floor fight, Oak Cliff freshman Steve Wolens offered a surprise amendment that would remove him from another representative’s district and pair him instead with Cofer. Her shrillest protest couldn’t stem the ensuing landslide; she got buried 106-28, amid laughter and applause.
Buck Florence, 44, conservative Democrat, Hughes Springs. A case study in the arrogance of power. Tried to operate the legislative machinery for his own ends but kept getting caught in the gears. Said a high-ranking member of the Speaker’s team: “He misused leverage worse than anyone in the House.”
Motivated by spleen rather than principle: carried on a session-long vendetta against his former law partner serving as consultant to Attorney General Mark White on the Howard Hughes estate case; threatened to decimate the AG’s budget unless White dumped him—even though the case had reached a particularly sensitive point and the lawyer knew far more about it than anyone on White’s staff. But to Florence a possible windfall of millions of dollars for the state treasury was of no consequence compared to the opportunity for personal vengeance. When White refused to knuckle under, the controversy reached the House floor in the form of an amendment that would have written the consultant out of future cases, but the House wrote Florence off instead.
As chairman of Judicial Affairs, turned the traditionally neutral committee into a battleground. Held hostage until the final weeks of the session all bills granting individuals permission to sue the state, bewildering colleagues who had expected them to be approved pro forma as usual. (The House leadership suspected that Florence was delaying all in order to camouflage his determination to kill one.) Took shortsighted aim on judges’ salaries. His logic: their pay is far more than beginning teachers’. More to the point, as judges pointed out, is that it’s not far more than beginning lawyers’—which is why there is growing concern in the legal profession that inadequate salaries make it difficult to attract good lawyers to the bench.
Shameless in floor debate: would check his dignity with his hat if he could serve his cause with buffoonery. Never spoke to merits; Demagoguery was his Muse. Opposed a motion to restore mass transit funding with “I rise to speak against this Republican amendment”—a reference to the fact that the proponent happened to be a Republican—but later voted with Republicans on truly partisan issues like redistricting. Attacked a minor bill authorizing a routine fund transfer from one mental health unit to another because a ruling by Judge Wayne Justice had made the shift necessary; lost 122-11, to a chorus of hoots from his colleagues.
Fired missiles at minnows: “There occasionally comes to this House a Senate bill that cries out to be killed. Such is the case with Senate Bill 1237.” And what was Senate Bill 1237? Interest rates? Wiretapping? No, just a hotel-motel tax increase for Houston. The House walked over him, as usual; by the time the session was over, Florence’s back had more footprints than the sands of time.
Bill Heatly, 68, conservative Democrat, Paducah. The once-mighty Duke of Paducah, spiritual heir to the Bourbon kings of France, of whom it was said, “They learn nothing and forget nothing.” A relic of the Legislature’s old days and, alas, old ways, when people thought policy was something you worried about when you bought insurance.
Once reigned unchallenged as suzerain of the state budget; still retains a peerless understanding of the appropriations process but uses it only to reward friends and punish enemies. Never looks at the forest, only at the trees—primarily his family tree. Raged and rampaged to fatten salaries and expense allowances for part-time district attorneys, a category that includes his two sons, and raised a ruckus in three committees before losing. Despite defeats that come more often than they used to (though not often enough), Heatly still remains so adroit at raiding the pork-barrel that, as was once said of meat-packing baron Philip Armour, he knows how to use all the pig except the squeal. Slipped in a $6.2 million bonus for a drug rehabilitation program in his rural West Texas district; senators opposed it, reasonably enough, on the grounds that the drug problem is in the cities and that’s where the money ought to be spent. That provoked a classic lesson on you-got-yours-I-get-mine politics, Heatly style:
HEATLY: As far as it bein’ out in the boondocks, people out there need assistance, too.
SENATOR: Mr. Heatly, everybody in the state knows why it was put out there. It’s because of you, Mr. Heatly.
HEATLY: The same was done for you, that upper-level college you got.
SENATOR: [Surrenders.]
Still regarded with affection by many around the Capitol—by conservative Democrats who see him as the last link to a legendary past; by liberals who share his loathing for Republicans; by lobbyists who profit from his loyalty for old friends. But increasingly he is seen as an anachronism, and an embarrassing one at that.
Members were not amused at revelations that Heatly had intervened to block sanctions against a nursing home where eight employees were later indicted for murder; they were shocked at Heatly’s suggestion, in a public committee hearing, that Attorney General Mark White fire a lawyer who had questioned state health officials about Heatly’s intervention; and they positively cringed when, in front of a gallery full of third-graders, Heatly took the microphone to present a jar of “red-ass salve” to a colleague. Even the Appropriations Committee, which is prone to regard him as a patron saint, began to focus on his feet of clay. Said a committee member: “He’d walk in and say, ‘I talked to so-and-so last night, he’s a good man, we ought to raise his appropriation.’ Every time he talks to someone it costs the state a couple of hundred thousand dollars.”
Perhaps the most poignant moment of the session came on Speaker’s Day when, with almost three hundred former House members gathered in the chamber for a reunion, Heatly took the microphone. “All these old men,” Heatly said to the current House, “they’re the ones who saved Texas. Let’s not give it away.” That is how Bill Heatly would like to be remembered, but it shall not come to pass.
John Leedom, 60, Republican, Dallas. The greatest contribution to negativism since the minus sign. A freshman who has never figured out that the role of a freshman is to learn and not teach. Won’t let another senator blow his nose without telling him what’s wrong with his handkerchief.
His fundamental error: he saw the Senate as a debating society when in reality it is a very exclusive club. An unwritten code governs what is, and is not, accepting conduct, and anyone who hopes to succeed in the Senate had best abide by it.
• Never act as though you know more than another Senator. But Leedom contested uncontested bills in committee, looking for hidden meanings that weren’t there, implying that he knew bills better than their sponsors. One colleague walked out on him during doesn’t-your-bill-do-so-and-so queries; on another occasion a subcommittee chairman interrupted pointless interrogations by gaveling the bill to passage.
• Never waste the Senate’s time. This applies particularly to freshmen—except, apparently, Leedom. One senator so lost patience with Leedom’s off-the-subject questions in floor debate that he raised a parliamentary objection, something senators never invoke against full-fledged members of their club.
• Never resort to ideology unless it is the issue. When lobbyists went to talk to him about a bill to change the way harbor pilots are appointed and regulated, all Leedom wanted to talk about was why the state shouldn’t regulate pilots at all.
• If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it. When Leedom opposed funding of centers for battered women with the argument that it would speed the breakup of families, the bill’s sponsor told him he was living in a fantasy world.
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it. But Leedom, it an effort to squirm out of a redistricting plan that will force him to run against another senator, proposed a plan that resembled the Caribbean islands: noncontiguous parts of districts floated free, a clear violation of law. When it was plotted on the map, the audience broke into laughter.
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